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by Ellyrianna
Summary: Welcome home. Nominated Best Miroku/Sango Romance 4th Quarter.


**Avatar**

_i guess i remember every glance you shot me_

_I love your smile._

She was thinking about what it would be like to commit suicide over having a natural death. As soon as she had come back to her flat from work, heated up noodles and saw the rain, she knew it would be the perfect night to think of such things. The noodles had been relegated to their Tupperware containers once more, she had put on a kimono of her dead mother's because it made her feel sexy and gothic (which, she thought, is how you should feel when thinking about death) and draped herself over her balcony railing.

Her flat was on the third floor, complete with a lovely view of the dumpsters across the road and a few sad-looking light posts. The rain had slicked the street and caused it to glow beneath the artificial light. If she was a little more sentimental, she would have tossed around the idea of calling it ethereal, but since she was not, she wound up dismissing such a stupid thought and tipped back her head under the rain.

_I love your voice._

It would have been nice if she had gotten more than ten minutes of comparing and contrasting suicide and natural death without being interrupted, but as it stood, she didn't. She was jerked out of her lethargic state of semi-meditation by a sharp shout from across the street -- which was nothing new; she couldn't afford the neighborhoods where muggings and rape as common occurrences didn't happen -- that was followed by a string of curses and then punctuated by a long silence.

She sat up, twisted around, and immediately saw the dark shape huddled underneath the protective glow of a streetlamp. She couldn't tell anything aside from the fact that it was human, and even that fact was mostly due to the speech she'd heard. While not one inherently to care overly much about others -- she always thought of herself as a solo flier -- something about the silence that had followed such a well-articulated outburst upset her.

"Hey!" she called as loudly as she could, hands cupped around her mouth. She got no response, and, frustrated, tried again. "Hey!" This time, to her satisfaction, the person shifted slightly, made some sort of noise she couldn't hear, and then attempted to respond.

"Help me?" was all she got, but it was enough for her. The voice didn't sound distinctly anything, but something inside her told her that the hunched person beneath the streetlamp was a man. While her luck had never been good, she had learned at a young age to trust her instincts.

_I love your hands._

Not bothering to put on something more appropriate, she scrambled to her feet and, wiping at the rain on her face, made her way out of her apartment and down to the street below. A quick glance either way showed no approaching cars, which then led to her sprinting on the balls of her feet to the other side. At her approach, the man raised his head.

"Nice kimono," he said with a chuckle. "It really accentuates your br--"

"Stop right there," she said sharply, stopping a few feet away from him. This made him laugh again, and then he nodded.

"Alright, fine. I'm in a bit of a fix here, and I need your help, so I'll stop," he promised. The logical part of her brain asked her why in hell she would trust some guy sitting on the side of the road, but her instincts once more kicked in, fervently telling her that she didn't need to fear anything from this guy. She let out a deep breath and then gestured to him.

"So what happened?" she asked, expecting to have to feign concern and feeling mildly surprised that it was real. It was unlike her to take an interest -- or, at the very least, a real one -- in someone she wasn't closely related to or good friends with, and she was starting to get worried.

The man laughed again, although it had a bitter edge to it. "I tripped," he said, and drew aside his jacket, which wasn't just wet from the rain.

_I love your skin._

"Shower's in there -- I'll look for some clothes for you," she said over her shoulder, moving into the belly of the apartment as he turned off into the bathroom. His story had been hastily explained on the run across the street and on the stairs up to her flat -- basically just that he'd been running a few errands (literally running, as his car was broken, he'd explained) and had tripped over a basketball that had rolled out in the middle of the sidewalk and had managed to skid and slide into the mouth of an alley. Said alley had a broken bottle just waiting for him, as proven by the shards of glass still clinging to the gashed skin of his stomach and the cuts along one side of his face.

His story was so improbable, so full of holes, so impossibly untrue, and yet...she couldn't help but believe him. It was something about his dark blue eyes and the way they reminded her of so many things at once and yet she drew a blank when searching for something deeper; something about his shoulder-length black hair and the way it teased his high cheekbones when he smiled, which was scarily often for a man that was bleeding sluggishly and had been out in the rain for some time. She couldn't say what, exactly, but there was something inside her that knew he was being truthful -- or, at least, truthful in the sense that it hadn't been anything outright bad that had happened.

She went to her bedroom, where she pulled open drawers and cartons of things she had yet to unpack even after nearly two years of living in her current flat. All that she could find after several minutes of searching were a pair of black sweatpants that were unmistakably her older brother's and an oversized purple shirt that she sometimes wore to bed. Deciding it was better than putting him in something like what she was wearing now, she shrugged and went back to the bathroom door.

"Here's some clothes for you," she called over the roar o the shower before tossing the clothes in and slamming the door shut again. She wondered if he had replied and she hadn't heard him, or if she was too adamant against him to want to hear him, and retreated back out the balcony.

The temperature seemed to have dropped several degrees, and she shivered without meaning to. She tried to remember how long it had been since she'd had a man in her apartment that wasn't there to fix her television and failed. For some reason, despite always being trim and having a nice figure, she'd never had much luck with relationships. Whenever she went out on a date, she felt like the man sitting across from her was a hollow shell -- that he was lacking something that even she couldn't put her finger on. It had always depressed her that, time and time again, no matter how promising the candidate, her relationships never lasted beyond two or three dates at best.

Leaning her elbows on the balcony railing, she tried to decide if it had been after she'd realized this or before that she had started thinking about death. With no one to occupy her spare time in the way that a man could, she had slowly come to believe that she would remain a spinster the rest of her life. The thought of life after coming to terms with that had seemed unbearably long, and she supposed that it was then that she started thinking about how death would be so much more interesting than the life she led now. Now, she woke up, made instant coffee, went to her dull desk job for a few hours, came back to her flat, made instant noodles or TV dinners or ordered in cheap take-out, paid bills, thumbed through doctor's office magazines of beautiful women and gorgeous men and then went back to sleep. Now, she bought her groceries in the little family-owned place she'd been going for years, and discreetly saw the owner's wife shake her head every time she saw her. Her life was a monotonous cycle broken only rarely by her few friends that still cared to call.

"My name's Mikio, by the way," he called to her suddenly, and she stood up sharply. She hadn't even realized that the shower had shut off and that the door had opened -- she'd been too absorbed in her own thoughts to pay attention to anything else. Hastily she scrubbed the rain away from her face and slipped back into the apartment.

"Nice name. I'm --" She cut herself off abruptly as he emerged from the hallway into the kitchen, which was where the balcony door was.

He had taken an elastic ponytail holder off of the ring she kept by the sink and used it to pull back his hair into a short little tail, effectively exposing a small gold eyebrow ring and three earrings -- all gold hoops; one in his left ear and two in the right. He brushed distractedly at his bangs, which were sticking up haphazardly all around his face, and offered her a tired smile. The purple shirt he was wearing didn't look oversized on him -- in fact, it was only a little bit bigger than necessary when he wore it, and the black sweatpants looked like they could have been made for him. He stretched both of his arms over his head, and she caught sight of what had to be the strangest-looking birthmark ever -- that is, a perfect circle in the center of his right palm.

She processed the entire image in one look, and she attempted to dismiss it, but as soon as the command went through her mind -- _alright, moving on -- _she couldn't see.

_I love your eyes._

"Houshi-sama, wel--"

He barged in right past her, throwing his staff to the ground in a clanging of rings and metal and wood. She jumped and felt her stomach sink -- he had found out somehow, someone had told him. She chanced a glance into his eyes, and saw them sparkling with unshed tears. He hadn't cried the first time -- in fact, he'd smiled the first time, insisted that it was some form of adjustment -- and he hadn't cried the second time, but now, three tries later, he was crying. Her stomach, after falling to her feet, began to painfully clench, a feeling she had come to despise over the past year.

"The third time! I can't believe this. I refuse to believe this. Why does this keep happening to us?" he shouted, smashing a misshapen pot full of flowers that had been sitting by the hearth. She flinched.

"Miroku, please, calm down -- we'll try again, don't worry, everything will work out..." She tried fervently to placate him, but found that nothing could subdue the anger and betrayal that he felt. Deep inside, she knew that he was within his right -- that coming home from an exorcism only to find out more bad news wasn't going to make him calm at all, that he shouldn't have been calm in any way.

"Three miscarriages in one year! Sango, why is this happening to us?" He was begging her for an answer that she didn't have, and he saw the hopelessness in her eyes as surely as he felt it in his heart. He went to smash the delicate tea set that Inu-Yasha and Kagome had given them as one of their wedding gifts, and she quickly ran across the room and grabbed him around the waist. He twisted around in her grasp, his eyes locked with a set of dishes stacked on a piece of cloth in the corner, and she used all of her taijiya strength to bring him to the ground with her, to stop his rampage. He shivered in her arms and buried his face in her shoulder; she held him as he cried, the way he had held her the first time this had happened.

Sango hated seeing him like this. He was rarely an emotional man, and when he fell into such a state of despair, it broke her heart. The fact that she was going to kill Kagome for telling him before she did was notwithstanding; that girl, already having had difficulties not getting pregnant, was slowly driving her mad with jealousy. Now with Miroku in such a state, her current ire for Kagome only increased.

"Stop this, Miroku, please -- it's going to work out, and we are going to have a child. Don't be upset -- smile for me, please? I love your smile." She held him tightly against her, arms wrapped around his back, and felt him shudder as he forced himself to calm down, to put on that smile that he always wore. She couldn't see his face, but she knew that he only wanted to make her happy. "Say something to me. I love your voice."

He let out a harsh breath, and then, after a moment, raised his head and looked at her. She pulled her arms away from his back and took one of his hands out of his lap. Slowly, sensually, she kissed the index finger of his right hand, where the curse of kazaana had once resided. "I love your hands," she said, and, almost automatically, he used his free hand to take hers. She felt the smooth skin of his palm pressed against her calluses and let go of his right hand; instead, she trailed it down his wet cheek. "I love your skin. No scars, no bumps, no blisters...smooth and pale. That's what our child's skin will be like."

Sango kissed him, and he responded, tangling his free hand in her hair. The other still held onto hers in a vise-like grip; she was afraid to try and take it away, afraid that he would shatter like glass if she broke the contact. She pulled away from him, looked into his dark blue eyes, and whispered, "I love your eyes. I love your blue eyes."

She didn't keep away from him any longer, and soon she had kissed all of his tears away and then some.

_I love your blue eyes._

"...You are?"

It could only have been a minute, but it felt like a century -- it felt like five centuries, actually. She was a very practical person, and had never believed in things like visions, but even she found it hard to deny what she had just seen. Still, a slightly puzzled Miroku -- _No, _she mentally corrected herself. _This is Mikio. Miroku...that's not..._

"Sachi," she finally managed to say. "Makoto Sachi." Looking up at him again, she had to blink at the uncanny resemblance between him and the other man -- Miroku -- but also had to ask herself if she was eating enough. People weren't prone to bizarre visions of men who looked just like other men and who were married to women who looked just like her --

_Just like me._

_That woman, Sango, looked just like me._

"I guess you're tired or something -- it's getting late. Thanks for letting me shower off and borrow your clothes; I'll return them sometime tomorrow, I guess." Mikio waved at her and turned to leave, and she almost let him, before a single thought went through her mind:

_Never told him welcome home._

_I never told him welcome home when he came back._

"Mikio!" she shouted as the apartment door slammed shut. She raced across the flat, yanked it open, and grabbed his arm as he went to go for the stairs. He turned around, holding his bundle of wet and bloody clothes under one arm. He made some sort of sound -- like "Hmm?" -- but said nothing else as she panted for a minute before gasping, "Welcome home."

_I can only let myself love one more thing about you..._

When he returned her clothes the next day, he was wearing jeans and a black shirt; also, his hair was down, and he was wearing glasses. She didn't have another bizarre vision of some five hundred year old monk and his miscarrying wife, but for some reason, whenever she meant to say 'Mikio', she found herself tripping over the name 'Miroku'. It seemed so familiar, so easy, that it just wanted to roll off of her tongue to make the job easier.

After about an hour of random chit-chatting and the tossing of the clothes he'd borrowed into the wash, she blurted unexpectedly, "Stay with me. Please, just stay with me."

_...your laughter..._

Mikio didn't seem repulsed, or even perplexed, as she'd expected him to; instead, he merely said, "What kind of staying did you have in mind?" They were sitting at her tiny kitchen table, looking at each other over cups of green tea that she'd made in a tea set that looked as fragile as five hundred year old china. It had been left to her by her mother, along with the kimono she'd worn on the night she felt like thinking about suicide.

"I don't care. Be my boyfriend, my best friend -- I don't care. I just want you to stay with me." She paused, took a sip of her tea, and watched him imploringly, but he made no comment -- just watched her closely. "Something just feels very right when I'm around you," she finally added.

He smiled at her. "I think I can feel that, too."

_...because I think if I allowed myself to love everything about you..._

Nine months later, the time it takes to have a baby, and she hadn't thought about death once. She hadn't thought about growing old alone in her flat eating reheated noodles and fending off advances from the alcoholic next door. She hadn't put on her mother's kimono except once, with Mikio's help, because he was sick that night and she wanted to make him feel better. It did the trick, and a lot else, too.

The same nine months later, and she was pregnant, unmarried, still working a boring desk job and spending her Friday nights paying bills -- only there was someone sitting next to her, balancing his checkbook, touching her stomach and smiling and then touching her rear and smiling even more. He endured her endless chastising for touching inappropriate places, but since his reasoning was that if she had allowed him to actually impregnate her, then he should be allowed to touch whatever he wanted. She responded that she would let him, but that her hormones were acting up due to the pregnancy and she couldn't control herself.

And after the bill paying, and the checkbook balancing, and the tea and the noodles and the touching and the yelling, she would bring him to her futon to watch whatever happened to be on television that night. He would put his head on her shoulder and his hands on her stomach, almost possessively, and would inevitably fall asleep to the sound of her heartbeat.

Only when she was absolutely sure that he was asleep, she would touch his earrings and pull back his hair and take off his glasses and whisper what she'd heard her call him so long ago:

"I love your smile. I love your voice. I love your hands. I love your skin. I love your eyes -- I love your blue eyes, Miroku."

When she was done, when she herself was finally feeling tired, she would shut off the television and close her eyes and listen hard, because she always fancied that, after these occasions, into her ear he would breathe the name Sango.

…_my heart wouldn't be able to handle it all._


End file.
